Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time Is the Ultimate Adaptation

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Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time Is the Ultimate Adaptation

Disney

Book adaptation is fraught. There are longtime fans to please, imaginations to live up to, childhood memories to compete with. It’s nearly impossible to please all the people all the time. Director Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time is out to do just that—by making a movie that reflects all of them.

In casting Wrinkle, DuVernay brought together one of the most diverse casts ever to appear in a Disney movie. Its Meg Murray is played by Storm Reid (12 Years a Slave). Her father is played by Star Trek/Wonder Woman star Chris Pine; her mother is played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which are played by Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, and Oprah Winfrey, respectively. It’s also got Ant-Man’s Michael Peña, Moonlight’s Andre Holland, and Zach Galifianakis. “I saw myself in it,” DuVernay told the crowd at the D23 Expo today before unveiling her film’s first teaser. “I thought if I could bring my ideas to the classic novel I thought we could do something new.” To do that she’s brought together “a cast that looks like the real world.”

And the cast isn’t the only way DuVernay is bringing Madeleine L’Engle’s 1963 novel into the real world. Kaling, whose Mrs. Who only speaks in wise adages, says her character doesn’t just evoke old-school scholars, she also utilizes wise words from all cultures. “I think I quote Jay-Z in the film,” she said.

“Ava thinks in this macro way that is very, very special,” Pine told the D23 crowd, adding that she “hits things on a cosmic level.”

The magnitude of that cosmic vision is evident in the movie’s first teaser, which takes Meg from her Los Angeles school to Camazotz—the distant planet that Meg must travel to in order to find her missing father. And in each shot, the visuals are epic, from the Happy Medium’s (Galifianakis) domain to that creepy cul-de-sac where all the kids bounce their balls in unison and Bellamy Young asks Meg if she’s lost in a way that sounds neither friendly nor helpful.

L’Engle’s book, by its nature, left a lot to the imagination. It had to. In the half-century since its release, more than a few generations have read it and imagined themselves on its pages and in its world. That’s a lot of people’s hopes and expectations to get into one movie—but in Ava DuVernay’s vision, they’re all on the screen.